Oddball Films and guest curator John
Schmidt present Relics and Remnants: The
Cinema of What’s Left, an evening exploration of ruin, decay, and loss.
The program begins with Bay Area filmmaker and journalist Jon Else’s You Don’t Die Here (1972), an impressionistic
documentary portrait of a small, eccentric community eking out an
existence in the unforgiving light of California’s Death Valley. Across the
world, Eugene Boyko records a real-life Wages
of Fear in his 1968 short Juggernaut (1969),
which follows a group of engineers as they attempt to transport a 70-ton
nuclear reactor core across the Indian continent. Glimpses of the traditional
life its pilgrimage quite literally displaces, serve as evocative counterpoint:
roads were fortified and buildings destroyed to let the titular juggernaut (ever-so-slowly)
pass. If in these two films the present impinges itself on—and comes into
direct contact with—remnants of the past, in the Academy Award winning Mexican
documentary Sentinels of Silence (1971) what
remains is mere palimpsest; ghostly traces of cultures long erased. Beautiful
aerial photography of Mesoamerican ruins and voiceover musing by Orson Welles
leave the viewer to wonder at the accomplishments and precipitous fall of
pre-Columbian Mayan civilization. We allow a brief animation interlude for
Croatian master Nedeljko Dragic’s free jazz destruction symphony Tup Tup (1973) before concluding the night with
a print of (the recently deceased) Alain Resnais’ masterful Night and Fog (1955), never before seen at Oddball. Horrifying and
necessary, the film combines archival material with meditative footage shot at
Auschwitz and Majdanek ten years after the end of World War II. In the process,
Resnais reveals the yawning gap between what’s left and what was, challenging
the commonplace assumption that we can ever really understand the magnitude of
history and its many traumas.
Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2015 at 8:00PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
Date: Friday, January 30th, 2015 at 8:00PM.
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 84, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 84th (and 7-year anniversary!) program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 84: Holographic is an anthology of carefully crafted experimental films emphasizing dimensionality, spirituality, high technology and art of the 60s. We begin with Holography: Memories in Light (1985), a fascinating look at the invention, development, and use of holography in industry and art; from holographic space ships to a holographic Andy Warhol. We continue with the mesmerizing documentary Kinetic Art in Paris (1971), a viscerally challenging kaleidoscopic homage to light sound and motion featuring some of the world's foremost kinetic artists, and Art of the Sixties (1967), featuring the monumental soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, machine artist Len Lye, Les Levine's interactive environments, action painter-provocateur Jackson Pollock and more. Once again, we are screening a selection of Whitney films, featuring motion graphics pioneer John Whitney Sr., brother James and son Michael's work, all profoundly audacious and inspiring in their fluidity, motion and spiritual subtext. John Whitney's Arabesque (1975) is a legendary masterpiece of shimmering, oscillating waves set to the music of Persian composer Maroocheher Sadeghi. Michael Whitney's Binary Bit Patterns (1969) is a hypnotic psych-folk audiovisual experience that suggests a secret symbiosis between the digital and the organic as various Eastern graphic permutations appear, dissolve and undergo metamorphoses on the screen. Lapis (1965), made by a spiritualized James Whitney (one of only 7 films he created) and one of the most accessible experimental films ever made; Lapis was created with handmade cels evoking a single mandala moving within itself; its particles surge around each other in constant metamorphosis. Finally, we offer up 3 Rarely Seen Experimental Films. These wondrous top-secret surprises incorporate aspects of yoga, INFINITY and Indian mysticism, exploring the relationship between LIGHT, scientific theories as well as CHAKRA-based spirituality. These moving images reflect the actual visual and auditory phenomena the filmmaker experienced in heightened states of meditative concentration. Many of the films share certain images which the filmmaker regarded as "hieroglyphic-ideographic" visual units that express complex ideation not easily stated in verbal terms.
Date: Friday, January 16th, 2015 at 8:00PM.
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Date: Thursday, January 15th, 2015 at 8:00PM.
Oddball Films presents Antique Animal Antics!, a program of vintage films full of adorable, hilarious and anthropomorphic animals. Decades before youtube, CGI, and the Buddies franchise, these furry film stars were doing tricks, solving crimes, talking, singing and drinking too much! The evening's beastly brigade includes the knee-slapping anti-drug scare film The Cat Who Drank and Used Too Much (1987). Monkey spy, monkey do with Lancelot Link Secret Chimp (1971), the crime-fighting slapstick simian. Jerry Fairbanks brings us singing bears in Your Pet Problem(1944) part of the Speaking of Animals series. Bird Circus (1950s) is a technicolor fantasy of vibrant showbirds that walk tight-ropes, ride bicycles and more. Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate (1938) stars our own local equine hero in all his glory. Silent era wonder-mutt Teddy saves Gloria Swanson from a dastardly villain in Teddy at the Throttle (1917). Interspecies parenting doesn't get any cuter than Mother Cat and her Baby Skunks (1958), unless you want to count the baby bunny in a dollhouse in The Adventures of Bunny Rabbit (1973). And head on down to the river with Hammy the Hamster and a rat in a motorboat in Tales from the Riverbank (1960). With even more animal surprises in store!
